Shelves of My Life

Robin Knight on books about Russia

Share this

There is a long shelf in our house with 66 books on it. Nothing unusual about that. But every one of these books has a powerful story to tell. Every one contains a memory. They speak to me on those evenings when I relax in a comfortable chair, with music playing in the background, and think back over the past forty years.

You see, all the books on this shelf are about Russia and the Soviet Union. I began collecting them at university but really got into full flow before, during and after a three-year spell in the late 1970s when I lived and worked in Moscow as a foreign correspondent for an American news magazine. A bit of a hiatus ensued after my wife and I left the USSR in 1979, but eventually perestroika prevailed, I resumed visiting what is now Russia in the late 1980s and continued doing so until quite recently – all the while adding to my book collection.

Right at the centre of the shelf are two books that defined my first period in Moscow – The Russians by Hedrick Smith and Russia by Robert Kaiser. Smith worked for the New York Times and Kaiser for the Washington Post, and the two of them were based in the Soviet capital in the same years in the early 1970s. Each day they competed against one another and then, when they left Moscow, they did so all over again through their books. Both were published in 1976, when I was struggling to learn Russian. They remain brilliant evocations of a lost era.

Of the two, Smith’s is livelier and more vivid, Kaiser’s darker and more nuanced. At the time they appeared, people were sharply divided over which one they preferred. Yet even today, more than thirty years later, I can remember the frisson I felt on a beach in Pembrokeshire in the scorching summer of 1976 as I read Smith’s brilliant and affectionate portrait of a people and country kept in thrall by a calamitous political system. Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav dissident and one-time friend of Tito, d

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

About the contributor

Robin Knight was a news magazine foreign correspondent for 28 years. Between 1976 and 1979 he travelled 50,000 miles in the Soviet Union but still was amazed when Communism collapsed within a decade of his departure. He says there is no connection.

Added to basket

Sign up for our free email newsletter?

The free Foxed News newsletter featuring articles from the quarterly, extracts from books, event invitations, latest releases, news from behind the scenes at Foxed HQ, offers from our partners, and other bookish content goes out to readers around the world by email several times each month.

First name:

Last name:

Email:

By signing up for our free email newsletter or our free printed catalogues, you will not automatically be subscribed to the quarterly magazine. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page.

Sign up to our e-newsletter

By signing up for our free email newsletter or our free printed catalogues, you will not automatically be subscribed to the quarterly magazine. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page.